What’s Selling?: Record Store Day 2017 (Part 2)

According to stats provided by Buzz Angle, Grateful Dead had the highest selling full length release of RSD 2017, while The Beatles took the top spot in the singles category (U.S. charts).

Overall, RSD 2017 increased sales over RSD 2016 by 6 percent, with vinyl album sales up 14% and vinyl single sales down 3 percent. Vinyl album sales were up 2,606 percent compared to the previous Saturday of April 15, while overall album sales were up 1,274 percent.

Check out the top 10 below (full charts at link).

Full Lengths

Grateful Dead — PNE Garden Auditorium

David Bowie — Cracked Actor

The Doors — Live At The Matrix ’67

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit — Live From Welcome To 1979

The Cure — Greatest Hits Acoustic

The Cure — Greatest Hits

Sublime — Badfish

Stevie Nicks — Rarities

The Claypool Lennon Delirium — Lime and Limpid Green

The Notorious B.I.G. — Born Again

Single Rankings

The Beatles — Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane

John Williams — Star Wars: A New Hope

U2 — Red Hill Mining Town

Pearl Jam — State of Love and Trust/Breath

Pink Floyd — Interstellar Overdrive

Prince — Little Red Corvette/1999

The Smiths — Boy With The Thorn In His Side

Alice In Chains — What The Hell Have I/Get Born Again

Rush — Cygnus X-1

Def Leppard — ST

Also, in Variety‘s report from the celebration, RSD co-founder Michael Kurtz said the following about record flipping on RSD:

“We’re always irritated by the eBay culture,” says Kurtz. “With Record Store Day we have to sit there and watch people post things on eBay that they don’t even have. It’s not even shipped yet, and they’re already taking orders, and we complain to eBay and they don’t care. That creates some negativity that we can’t do anything about.” But watermarking the cover photos with giant anti-resale text “was a complete success,” he adds. “Not one of those flippers used that artwork, so they all had to go out and steal images from record store websites of boxes and say ‘Here it is! A fake picture of a box!’ We definitely ruined their little scam that they had going on, and now they have to wait till after Record Store Day to get the real photos up. There are about 600,000 pieces that were sold on RSD, out of 650,000 that were shipped to stores, and of those, I think about 7,000 ended up on eBay. So that’s about 1 percent. That’s good to know, that almost 99 percent of everything goes home to a music fan.”

Christopher Lantinen
Chris Lantinen is the owner and editor-in-chief of Modern Vinyl. Along with his modest collection of sad sounding records, he collects his share of soundtracks and previously adored indie up-and-comers. Chris is currently a professor of journalism and public relations at Edinboro University in the Erie, Pennsylvania area.